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“We’re having an argument in the first minute of the interview!” Williams says.

Eh, let’s just call it an honest attempt at journalistic fact checking. Now officially a husband-and-wife singing duo with the release of Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams, their first album together, their cross-country trip leads them to Rochester on Sunday. It’s “Abilene on the Road,” a show too big for the tiny confines of Rochester’s roots-minded club. So they’ll be playing The Penthouse, the new event center on the top floor of the One East Avenue building.

Campbell’s résumé as an Americana star is impeccable. He spent nearly eight years as Bob Dylan’s guitarist, then moved on to musical director for Levon Helm’s band, as well as at the Midnight Ramble, the jam sessions in Helm’s studio barn in Woodstock. A winner of three Grammys as Helm’s producer until his death, the multi-instrumentalist Campbell has also worked with Cyndi Lauper, Rosanne Cash, Elvis Costello, Willie Nelson, The Black Crowes and Emmylou Harris.

If you’re doubting Campbell’s roots credibility just because he was born and raised in New York City, we can turn to Williams. A stage actor and honky-tonk singer who’s worked with a lot of the same people as her husband, she grew up in Peckerwood Point, Tennessee.

Stop laughing, Peckerwood Point is a real place, she insists. Although, “I think some of the powers that be tried to suppress it,” she admits. When the town built a new school, a contest was held to name it. Anything but Peckerwood Point Elementary. But this place is authentic Americana. Her grandfather ran the general store. “It had the checkerboard and pot-bellied stove,” Williams says, and she remained that small-town kid until it was time to go off to college. “I didn’t want to leave there, per se,” she says, “but I had to go and pursue my career.”

“I love it down there,” Campbell says, slowly and carefully. There are marital landmines here. “But actually, just to be living there, I don’t know. That’s something I have to digest.”

They met almost 30 years ago, when Williams hired Campbell to back her at a gig. “I thanked him for lugging his pedal steel down for a short rehearsal,” she says. “I could see who he was from the first time we met. His honesty and sincerity, I could see his soul in that moment. I could see he was it for me. He was with somebody else, but I had him in mind that whole year.”

Adds Campbell, “As soon as I met Teresa, I thought: I gotta get me some of that.”

They laugh about that remark; they laugh about everything. They might be fun to tour with in that car, if you could find a seat among the guitars and suitcases. Creative people often end up together, but sometimes working in the same discipline — movie-star marriages attract lawyers like a feeder does birds — can be problematic.

“It’s a real bind, if you think about it,” Campbell says. “It’s a potential recipe for disaster. In its own way, it’s incestuous.

“But Teresa and I are so much on the same wavelength, we can actually have a relationship and put that aside and have a musical relationship.”

And besides, “When we’re working on music is the only time she listens to me.”

That smart-aleck comment’s a hit in the tight confines of their SUV. Williams suggests a little maturity — “We were older when we met” — may have worked in their favor.

Still, they were married for two decades before getting around to Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams. Country duets by a married couple? George Jones and Tammy Wynette aside, “It just seemed icky to me,” Williams says.

Campbell pleads a busy work schedule. But every time he’d start working with Phil Lesh, or Jorma Kaukonen and Hot Tuna, they’d say, “Hey, bring your wife …”

So the new duo, Campbell says, grew “naturally and organically. It really kicked into gear after Levon died.”

Campbell wrote or co-wrote most of the songs on Larry Campbell & Teresa Williams, but Williams had some input. “She’s got a great radar for dishonesty,” he says.

“There’s one line in one song, I still cringe when I sing it,” she says. “Sometimes I muffle the words.”

Perhaps the late start on their duets career is simply because they’ve been busy with people like Dylan. An interesting man, Campbell says. “Mercurial.”

Dylan. Mercurial?

“Right up there with ‘enigma,’ ” Campbell says. “But the person who had the biggest effect on me, shaping the path I wanted to follow, was Levon. There was an honesty about who he was and what he did that he couldn’t help. He urged me to play music that was risky, joyous.”

“For me, Levon too,” Williams says; Helm was from Arkansas, he lived Americana. “Everything I got from him I also got from my father, my parents. We all grew up in the cotton patch. When he died, it was a real personal loss.”

Authenticity, honesty, sincerity. Campbell and Williams both agree on all that. But in the final minute of the interview, they re-live this morning’s disagreement over the cargo capacity of their Ford Estate, which has been overwhelmed.